Phantoms Part 35

Above the three pots, there was a stainless-steel range hood with an exhaust fan. When the food had burned, the hood had contained the short-lived flash of flames and had prevented the fire from spreading to the surrounding cabinetry.

Outside again, everyone (except Major Arkham in his decontamination suit) took deep breaths of the clean mountain air. They needed a couple of minutes to purge their lungs of the vile stuff they had breathed inside that house.

Then, next door, they found the first body of the day. It was John Farley, who owned the Mountain Tavern, which was open only during the ski season. He was in his forties. He had been a striking man, with salt-and pepper hair, a large nose, and a wide mouth that had frequently curved into an immensely engaging smile. Now he was bloated and bruised, his eyes bulging out of his skull, his clothes bursting at the seams as his body swelled.

Farley was sitting at the breakfast table, at one end of his big kitchen. On a plate before him was a meal of cheese-filled ravioli and meatb.a.l.l.s. There was also a gla.s.s of red wine. On the table, beside the plate, there was an open magazine. Farley was sitting up straight in his chair. One hand lay palm-up in his lap. His other arm was on the table, and in that hand was clenched a crust of bread. Farley's mouth was partly open, and there was a bite of bread trapped between his teeth. He had perished in the act of chewing; his jaw muscles had never even relaxed.

"Good G.o.d." Tal said, "he didn't have time to spit the stuff out or swallow it. Death must've been instantaneous."

"And he didn't see it coming, either," Bryce said. "Look at his face. There's no expression of horror or surprise or shock as there is with most of the others."

Staring at the dead man's clenched jaws, Jenny said, "What I don't understand is why death doesn't bring any relaxation of the muscles whatsoever. It's weird."

In Our Lady of the Mountains Church, sunlight streamed through the stained-gla.s.s windows, which were composed predominantly of blues and greens. Hundreds of irregularly shaped patches of royal blue, sky blue, turquoise, aquamarine, emerald green, and many other shades dripped across the polished wooden pews, puddled in the aisles, and shimmered on the walls.

It's like being underwater, Gordy Brogan thought as he followed Frank Autry into the strangely and beautifully illuminated nave.

Just beyond the narthex, a stream of crimson light splashed across the white marble font that contained the holy water. It was the crimson of Christ's blood. The sun pierced a stained-gla.s.s image of Christ's bleeding heart and sprayed sanguineous rays upon the water that glistened in the pale marble bowl.

Of the five men in the search team, only Gordy was a Catholic. He moistened two fingers in the holy water, crossed himself, and genuflected.

The church was solemn, silent, still.

The air was softened by a pleasant trace of incense.

In the pews, there were no worshipers. At first it appeared as if the church was deserted.

Then Gordy looked more closely at the altar and gasped.

Frank saw it, too. "Oh, my G.o.d."

The chancel was cloaked in more shadows than was the rest of the church, which was why the men hadn't immediately noticed the hideous-and sacrilegious-thing above the altar. The altar candles had burned down all the way and had gone out.

However, as the men in the search team progressed hesitantly down the center aisle, they got a clearer and clearer view of the life-size crucifix that rose up from the center of the altar, along the rear wall of the chancel. It was a wooden cross, with an exquisitely detailed, hand-painted, glazed plaster figure of Christ fixed to it. At the moment, much of the G.o.dly image was obscured by another body that hung in front of it. A real body, not another plaster corpus. It was the priest in his robes; he was nailed to the cross.

Two altarboys knelt on the floor in front of the altar. They were dead, bruised, bloated.

The flesh of the priest had begun to darken and to show other signs of imminent decomposition. His body was not in the same bizarre condition as all the others that had been found thus far. In his case, the discoloration was what you would expect of a day-old corpse.

Frank Autry, Major Isley, and the other two deputies continued through the gate in the altar railing and stepped up into the chancel.

Gordy wasn't able to go with them. He was too badly shaken and had to sit in the front pew to keep from collapsing.

After inspecting the chancel and glancing through the sacristy door, Frank used his walkie-talkie to call Bryce Hammond in the building next door. "Sheriff, we've found three here in the church. We need Doc Paige for positive IDs. But it's especially grisly, so better leave Lisa in the vestibule with a couple of the guys."

"We'll be there in two minutes," the sheriff said.

Frank came down from the chancel, through the gate in the railing, and sat down beside Gordy. He was holding the walkie-talkie in one hand and a gun in the other. "You're a Catholic."

"Yeah."

"Sorry you had to see this."

"I'll be okay," Gordy said. "It's no easier for you just because you're not a Catholic."

"You know the priest?"

"I think his name's Father Callahan. I didn't go to this church, though. I attended St. Andrew's, down in Santa Mira."

Frank put the walkie-talkie down and scratched his chin. "From all the other indications we've had, it looked like the attack came yesterday evening, not long before Doc and Lisa came back to town. But now this... If these three died in the morning, during Ma.s.s-"

"It was probably during Benediction," Gordy said. "Not Ma.s.s."

"Benediction?"

"The Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. The Sunday evening service."

"Ah. Then it fits right in with the timing of the others." He looked around at the empty pews. "What happened to the parishioners? Why are only the altarboys and the priest here?"

"Well, not an awful lot of people come to Benediction," Gordy said. "There were probably at least two or three others. But it took them."

"Why didn't it just take everyone?"

Gordy didn't answer.

"Why did it have to do something like this?" Frank pressed.

"To ridicule us. To mock us. To steal our hope," Gordy said miserably.

Frank stared at him.

Gordy said, "Maybe some of us have been counting on G.o.d to get us through this alive. Probably most of us have. I know I've sure been praying a lot since we came here. Probably you have, too. It knew we would do that. It knew we would ask G.o.d for help. So this is its way of letting us know that G.o.d can't help us. Or at least that's what it would like us to believe. Because that's its way. To instill doubt about G.o.d. That's always been its way."

Frank said, "You sound as if you know exactly what we're up against here."

"Maybe," Gordy said. He stared at the crucified priest, then turned to Frank again. "Don't you know? Don't you really, Frank?"

After they left the church and went around the corner onto the cross street, they found two wrecked cars.

A Cadillac Seville had run across the front lawn of the church rectory, mowing down the shrubbery in its path, and had collided with a porch post at one corner of the house. The post was nearly splintered in two. The porch roof was sagging.

Tal Whitman squinted through the side window of the Caddy. "There's a woman behind the wheel."

"Dead?" Bryce asked.

"Yeah. But not from the accident."

At the other side of the car, Jenny tried to open the driver's door. It was locked. All of the doors were locked, and all of the windows were rolled up tight.

Nevertheless, the woman behind the wheel-Edna Gower; Jenny knew her-was like the other corpses. Darkly bruised. Swollen. A scream of terror frozen on her twisted face.

"How could it get in there and kill her?" Tal wondered aloud.

"Remember the locked bathroom at the Candleglow Inn," Bryce said.

"And the barricaded room at the Oxleys'," Jenny said.

Captain Arkham said, "It's almost an argument for the general's nerve gas theory."

Then Arkham unclipped a miniaturized geiger counter from his utility belt and carefully examined the car. But it wasn't radiation that had killed the woman inside.

The second car, half a block away, was a pearl-white Lexus. On the pavement behind it were black skid marks. The Lexus was angled across the street, blocking it. The front end was punched into the side of a yellow Chevy van. There wasn't a lot of damage because the Lexus had almost braked to a stop before hitting the parked vehicle.

The driver was a middle-aged man with a bushy mustache. He was wearing cut-off jeans and a Dodgers T-shirt. Jenny knew him, too. Marty Sussman. He had been Snowfield's city manager for the past six years. Affable, earnest Marty Sussman. Dead. Again, the cause of death was clearly not related to the collision.

The doors of the Lexus were locked. The windows were closed up tight, just as they had been on the Cadillac.

"Looks like they both were trying to escape from something," Jenny said.

"Maybe," Tal said. "Or they might just have been out for a drive or going somewhere on an errand when the attack came. If they were trying to escape, something sure stopped them cold, forced them right off the street."

"Sunday was a warm day. Warm but not too warm," Bryce said. "Not hot enough to ride around with the windows closed and the air conditioner on. It was the kind of day when most people keep the windows down, taking advantage of the fresh air. So it looks to me as if, after they were forced to stop, they put up the windows and locked themselves in, trying to keep something out."

"But it got them anyway," Jenny said.

It.

Ned and Sue Marie Bischoff owned a lovely Tudor-style home set on a double lot, nestled among huge pine trees. They lived there with their two boys. Eight-year-old Lee Bischoff could already play the piano surprisingly well, in spite of the smallness of his hands, and once told Jenny he was going to be the next Stevie Wonder "only not blind." Six-year-old Terry looked exactly like a black-skinned Dennis the Menace, but he had a sweet temper.

Ned was a successful artist. His oil paintings sold for as much as thirty thousand dollars, and his limited edition prints went for two grand apiece.

He was a patient of Jenny's. Although he was only thirty-two and was already a success in life, she had treated him for an ulcer.

The ulcer wouldn't be bothering him any more. He was in his studio, lying on the floor in front of an easel, dead.

Sue Marie was in the kitchen. Like Hilda Beck, Jenny's housekeeper, and like many other people all over town, Sue Marie had died while preparing dinner. She had been a pretty woman. Not any more.

They found the two boys in one of the bedrooms.

It was a wonderful room for kids, large and airy, with bunk beds. There were built-in bookshelves full of children's books. On the walls were paintings that Ned had done just for his kids, whimsical fantasy scenes quite unlike the pieces for which he was well known: a pig in a tuxedo, dancing with a cow in an evening gown; the interior of a s.p.a.ceship command chamber, where all the astronauts were toads; an eerie yet charming scene of a school playground at night, bathed in the light of a full moon, no kids around, but with a huge and monstrous-looking werewolf having a grand and giddy time on a set of swings.

The boys were in one comer, beyond an array of overturned Tonka Toys. The younger boy, Terry, was behind Lee, who seemed to have made a valiant effort to protect his smaller brother. The boys were staring out into the room, eyes bulging, their dead gazes still fixed upon whatever had threatened them yesterday. Lee's muscles had locked, so that his thin arms were in the same position now as they had been in the last seconds of his life: raised in front of him, shielding him, palms spread, as if warding off blows.

Bryce knelt in front of the kids. He put one trembling hand against Lee's face, as if unwilling to believe that the child was actually dead.

Jenny knelt beside him.

"Those are the Bischoffs' two boys," she said, unable to keep her voice from breaking. "So now the whole family's accounted for."

Tears were streaming down Bryce's face.

Jenny tried to remember how old his own son was. Seven or eight? About the same age as Lee Bischoff. Little Timmy Hammond was lying in the hospital in Santa Mira this very minute, comatose, just as he had been for the past year. He was pretty much a vegetable. Yes, but even that was better than this. Anything was better than this.

Eventually, Bryce's tears dried up. There was rage in him now. "I'll get them for this," he said. "Whoever did this... I'll make them pay."

Jenny had never met a man quite like him. He had considerable masculine strength and purpose, but he was also capable of tenderness.

She wanted to hold him. And be held.

But, as always, she was far too guarded about expressing her own emotional state. If she had possessed his openness, she would never have become estranged from her mother. But she wasn't that way, not yet, although she wanted to be. So, in response to his vow to get the killers of the Bischoffs' children, she said, "But what if it isn't anything human that killed them? Not all evil is in men. There's evil in nature. The blind maliciousness of earthquakes. The uncaring evil of cancer. This thing here could be like that-remote and unaccountable. There'll be no taking it to court if it isn't even human. What then?"

"Whoever or whatever the h.e.l.l it is, I'll get it. I'll stop it. I'll make it pay for what's been done here," he said stubbornly.

Frank Autry's search team prowled through three deserted houses after leaving the Catholic church. The fourth house wasn't empty. They found Wendell Hulbertson, a high school teacher who worked in Santa Mira but who chose to live here in the mountains, in a house that had once belonged to his mother. Gordy had been in Hulbertson's English cla.s.s only five years ago. The teacher was not swollen or bruised like the other corpses; he had taken his own life. Backed into a comer of his bedroom, he had put the barrel of a .32 automatic in his mouth and had pulled the trigger. Evidently, death by his own hand had been preferable to whatever it had been about to do to him.

After leaving the Bischoff residence, Bryce led his group through a few houses without finding any bodies. Then, in the fifth house, they discovered an elderly husband and wife locked in a bathroom, where they had tried to hide from their killer. She was sprawled in the tub. He was in a heap on the floor.

"They were patients of mine," Jenny said. "Nick and Melina Papandrakis."

Tal wrote their names down on a list of the dead.

Like Harold Ordnay and his wife in the Candleglow Inn, Nick Papandrakis had attempted to leave a message that would point a finger at the killer. He had taken some iodine from the medicine cabinet and had used it to paint on the wall. He hadn't had a chance to finish even one word. There were only two letters and part of a third: "Can anyone figure out what he intended to write?" Bryce asked.

They all took turns squeezing into the bathroom and stepped over Nick Papandrakis's corpse to have a look at the orange-brown letters on the wall, but none of them had any flashes of inspiration.

Bullets.

In the house next to the Papandrakis's, the kitchen floor was littered with expended bullets. Not entire cartridges. Just dozens of lead slugs, sans their bra.s.s casings.

The fact that there were no ejected casings anywhere in the room indicated that no gunfire had taken place here. There was no odor of gunpowder. No bullet holes in the walls or cabinets.

There were just bullets all over the floor, as if they had rained magically out of thin air.

Frank Autry scooped up a handful of the gray lumps of metal. He wasn't a ballistics expert, but, oddly, none of the bullets was fragmented or badly deformed, and that enabled him to see that they had come from a variety of weapons. Most of them-scores of them-appeared to be the type and caliber of ammunition that was spat out by the submachine guns with which General Copperfield's support troops were armed.

Are these slugs from Sergeant Harker's gun? Frank wondered. Are these rounds Harker fired at his killer in the meat locker at Gilmartin's Market?

He frowned, perplexed.

He dropped the bullets, and they clattered on the floor. He plucked several other slugs off the tile. There were a .22 and a .32 and another .22 and a .38. There were even a lot of shotgun pellets.

He picked up a single 9mm bullet and examined it with special interest.

Gory Brogan hunkered down beside him.

Frank didn't look at Gordy. He continued to stare intently at the slug. He was wrestling with an eerie thought.

Gordy scooped a few bullets off the kitchen tiles. "They aren't deformed at all."